E-commerce websites are websites that facilitate the buying and selling of products or services (e.g., software, etc.) over electronic systems such as the internet or other computer networks. Many companies maintain e-commerce websites that that allow consumers to review information about, and/or purchase various products that they are offering for sale. Information that is posted on these websites can come from sources of product data that are external to the product team of the companies that maintain these sites.
When information about a product is provided to an e-commerce website from disparate external sources, the information about the product that is provided is susceptible to duplication. Moreover, a matching up of the information provided about a product from one external source with information provided about the product from another external source can be difficult. This is because the information provided about a product may not be entirely complete and because subsequent provisions of information about the product may come in the form of meta-data that is only a subset of other provisions of information about that product.
This is particularly true for e-commerce websites of companies whose product catalog can be populated with data from providers that are external to their product team. It should be appreciated that the duplicated products information can cause confusion as it relates to ascertaining for which product information actually represents a product. Conventional e-commerce sites do not possess systems that address the causes of such confusion. Moreover, conventional e-commerce sites do not possess systems to collect information from the disparate sources about a product in a manner that ensures that all of the collected information is fully reflected in the information that is eventually presented about the product.